...welcome to a media space in which we are consuming hostility and processing raw data and raw propaganda almost as quickly as the war correspondent, the fighter pilot, the governments, the diplomats and the antagonists themselves.

I’ve been working for a while on compiling a list of photography grants, competitions and festivals that don’t charge or only charge small amounts for submissions.

Mario Pires's insight:

"I’ve also come to question more and more those situations where photographers are essentially expected to pay for access, or to pay someone to do their job. Portfolio reviews seem to me the most obvious and troubling example of this, a situation where we pay to jump the queue and go and see an editor or a curator who might be able to help us with work. In participating in this we are, in effect, paying a premium just to talk to a person whose job it already is to look at photography."

Exactly what I feel all the time. It's already damned difficult to find all these grants, and competitions, find the time to enter, and now you also have to find the money to enter. Even known sites like lensculture etc. Only photographers with time and money can make an entry and win. Is that fair? I don't know a lot of photographers with any of these!-)

Unless you’re well-versed in the British conceptual art scene of the 1970s, Keith Arnatt's name might not register the strongest recognition. Yet, Arnatt has a case for being one of the most influential British artists and photographers of his generation, pushing the boundaries of his mediums and going on to be a chief influence on the likes of Martin Parr and Paul Graham.

Mario Pires's insight:

"His indelible influence on a generation of photographers and the realm of conceptual photography is clear; in 2004 while guest-curating Recontre d’Arles, Martin Parr outlined how Arnatt expanded the capacity for the medium. While Arnatt’s work could deal with the fleeting, he was always grounded in a clear-eyed philosophy."

One of the hardest challenges for a photographer might be to figure out how she or he wants to position her or himself: what is it exactly that I do? When using the word “position” I’m not at all interested in the marketing of one’s work.

Mario Pires's insight:

"What is that conversation? For my students, this usually comes down to finding references. But it’s not about the references per se. Of course, every photographer needs to know what her or his work is in dialogue with. Knowing about the dialogue is good, understanding what exactly that dialogue is — that’s really where the meat can be found."

I used to believe that photojournalism represented a platonic ideal of veracity, but this naïve notion has eroded.

Mario Pires's insight:

"Yet, one thing that hasn’t changed for me is the belief that the photojournalist and photojournalism should strive to practice and convey empathy. While the casual observer might believe that photojournalism’s raison d’etre is to display the news, I would disagree. News, when not being salacious, informs of us the human condition, and should ideally strike a chord of empathy within us."

The Norwegian press as a whole, has made a joint statement to never sign any contracts put forward by artists or their management pushed forward by concert photographers, as can be read here. In Norway, most concert photographers are, in essence, photojournalists and identify more or less as such. And because of that, we are part of the press. We are not 100 concert photographers, but 7000 journalists.

Mario Pires's insight:

Collective action can still have results. Now i wish that we could also do something about bad light people.

A force that important in visual culture is probably worth having a theory about. And in fact, rather than just being swept along by the stream of images, it may be possible for art—and art history—to add something to understanding the photo-sharing obsession.

Mario Pires's insight:

"Technology has so democratized image-making that it has put the artistic power once mainly associated with aristocrats—to stylize your image and project yourself to an audience as desirable—into everyone's hands."

"Technology has so democratized image-making that it has put the artistic power once mainly associated with aristocrats—to stylize your image and project yourself to an audience as desirable—into everyone's hands."

"Technology has so democratized image-making that it has put the artistic power once mainly associated with aristocrats—to stylize your image and project yourself to an audience as desirable—into everyone's hands."

Let’s be clear: there is no such thing as cultural appropriation. Why? Because ‘culture’ itself is the product of appropriation from the very start. Every aspect of culture comes from elsewhere. ‘Your’ culture isn’t yours, it is the culture of your ancestors and your peers.

Entartete delivers solitary sex and guilt and self-revelation so fierce that sometimes it leaves you gasping. By Eugenie Shinkle, ASX, July 2015 Entartete is German for ‘degenerate’. It’s the title...

Mario Pires's insight:

"The pictures in Entartete are not sexy, but then they aren’t meant to be. They lack the single-track affect of porn – the warm thump of the gaze as it reaches down into the belly. And where pornography deals in airbrushed fictions, Lino’s photographs are raw and real and unconcerned with flattery."

The Bronx Documentary Center (BDC) is running a show. Here’s the message they sent to documentary photographer Chris Arnade explaining his inclusion.

Mario Pires's insight:

"I recognize the photographer’s skill as image makers. But more than that I recognize something they all share in common, an interest in, and respect for the human condition in all its forms and a willingness to engage with it. Theirs is not surreptitious ‘stolen’ work, but direct and engaged, and as a result there’s a lot of it that makes me very very uncomfortable. Which is as it should be."

Sure, the exhibitions were great, and from the very first day there was a kind of infectious joy. The whole city seemed to be living and breathing photography. Everyone wanted this first edition led by Sam Stourdzé to be a success, and it was.

Mario Pires's insight:

"But the evening programs were terrible, from the first (Martin Parr) to the last (Curtis). They were all terrible with the possible exception of Jacques Attali’s but that had nothing to do with photography. They were long, boring and filled with endless speeches..."

A fairly large segment of photography has become solely focused on the production of visual cliches. This development concerns all types of photography, however different they might appear at first (whether visually or functionally).

Mario Pires's insight:

"Per se, there is nothing wrong with cliche photography. Considerations of such photography must include the context it is embedded in. Someone looking at a pornographic image for the sake of sexual gratification is unlikely to be bothered by the cliches thus encountered — much like someone looking at a friend’s photograph of her or his young baby is unlikely to point out any problems (unless, of course, there is a severe lack of the kinds of basic social skills that enable societies to function)."

“It is about expressing an idea freely. As soon as you say you’re a photographer, you’re immediately blocking yourself inside a medium or a technology. “

Mario Pires's insight:

“because when we make associative thoughts in our consciousness we do it in a way that relates a smell to an image, or whatever and a pattern emerges and I was thinking that with tagging, it is principally an artificial way of doing the same thing.“

Andy described him as – “one of the most fascinating men in the world …… he’s like a modern Tarzan. He jumps in and out of the snake pit he keeps at his home. He cuts himself and paints with the blood. He wears sandals and no socks in the middle of Winter.

Mario Pires's insight:

"Peter first came to know Andy through his uncle, Jerome Hill, one of the early partners in Andy’s Interview magazine. Beard in turn came to know Lee when he was assigned a photo shoot of the Rolling Stones’s Exile on Main Street tour in 1972. Long remembered as one of the most decadent rock and roll campaigns of the overly indulgent ’70’s, the frenzy to report this momentous event was such that the most prominent papers of the day battled to cover this bacchanalian tour. Rolling Stone magazine topped them all by assigning Truman Capote to follow the tour, and Peter to photograph."

The streets of the Manchester slums, in which children played on concrete roads and their parents watched as terraced homes were razed to the ground in favor of new developments, became in the 1960s and two decades following like a home away from home for British street photographerShirley Baker (1932-2014), whose middle class family owned a furniture store in Salford.

Mario Pires's insight:

"For Douglas, however, these images escape relegation to the realm of wistfulness or sentimentality; instead, they reach through the decades to touch on themes and characters that carry weight and meaning today. Yes, they are documentary images, but for Douglas, they can also be symbolic ones, those that speak to an abiding vigor and resilience of the human spirit."

Alec Soth is far afield from the portraiture I’ve previously been drawn to, but the skill with which he crafts his photography books is undeniable.

The potency of his work lies in the emotions his books are able to bring out in the viewer, both from the single images and the sum of those images sequenced just so.

Mario Pires's insight:

"I was a person who always had to have a job, I was just raised that way or whatever, so the idea of leaving my job, I found really stressful. Exciting, of course, but, like, “can I sustain this?” And I didn’t have a graduate degree, so it’s not like I could just dive into teaching, it was a bit of a gamble, at that point. And that’s actually why I started doing editorial work, it was like a back-up, and yeah, it was nerve-wracking, but really great."

The content may criticize the media or the state or the history of photography, but I would be disappointed if the work were reducible to any one of those things.

Mario Pires's insight:

"Reality, as I witness it on the street, is a humbling thing. Maybe that is why artists escape into the realm of “subjectivity”? Photographers seem to escape it with the reductive “objectivity.” I would like to give each its measure: the process of finding the proper proportion continues still."

"Reality, as I witness it on the street, is a humbling thing. Maybe that is why artists escape into the realm of “subjectivity”? Photographers seem to escape it with the reductive “objectivity.” I would like to give each its measure: the process of finding the proper proportion continues still."

Yesterday evening saw a burst of online interest in an account apparently belonging to a Senegalese migrant named Abdou Diouf, who had documented his dangerous journey first on foot through the North African Desert and then across the Mediterranean by rowing boat to Spain.

Mario Pires's insight:

"Many questions emerge out of this account, but two in particular stand out strongly for me. The first is about the motivations of Toure and his collaborators, and the implications of setting up this account at a time when migration into Europe is such a current, controversial, and tragic topic. It’s easy to feel that the intention of this account are basically benign. It seems constructed to engender sympathy for the plight of migrants, putting us into their shoes through a platform we are all familiar with."

Harry Gruyaert’s Moroccan pictures have the tenacious certitude of mystery. Their content is neither sociological nor ethnographical, and even less so exotic or journalistic. All anecdote is banished, and time—the story, what comes before and after the photograph—appears to be suspended.

Mario Pires's insight:

"In Europe and especially France, there’s a humanistic tradition of people like Cartier-Bresson where the most important thing is the people, not so much the environment. I admired it, but I was never linked to it. I was much more interested in all the elements: the decor and the lighting and all the cars: the details were as important as humans. That’s a different attitude altogether."

More and more, I’m seeing wealth and power — in specific photo stories, and even more so, in the increasingly random presentation of news photos — as not just a recurrent theme, but as connective tissue.

Mario Pires's insight:

"There are no shortage of homeless scenes as you look around the newswire. In this case, though, the melding of one situation into the other, and the visceral work of the color, interconnects the situations and the prospects in a way that is all-too-provocative, especially when you also dial-in how much the street accomodation looks like a hospital bed."

Examining the interpretative visual logic at work in popular culture, this article proposes to recognize as a heuristic tool the iconographic group formation process, called narrative imageries, on the model of narrative identity by Paul Ricœur.

The above photograph starkly signifies the despair and indignation experienced by the Greek people. It depicts a pensioner, who after his fourth failed attempt to withdraw 120 Euros on behalf of his wife, breaks down in tears.

Mario Pires's insight:

"The photograph almost functions like a visual warning to other pensioners in troubled European countries such as Portugal, Italy, Spain, Ireland or even France. The photographs says to those people across Europe, if you dare to vote for a political party that is willing to stand up against the neoliberal ideology of the EU, then you must suffer the consequences."

Over the past few months, I have spent a lot of time thinking about what I do. To be more precise, I have been thinking a lot about the role of criticism in contemporary photography. What is criticism? What should it do? What do I want it to do? And what does this all mean for my own approach to it?

Mario Pires's insight:

"Good photographs are those that raise questions, that open up new ways of thinking or feeling – not those that confirm something. My main question when approaching a body of work, any body of work really, is: what does this tell me that I don’t already know? Am I learning something? Am I made to confront established ways of thinking or feeling with what is placed in front of me? That’s the toughest challenge for photography, given that the moment you place your camera in front of something it’s all right there."

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